It wouldn't be fair to say World+Dog isn't buying new tellies at the moment, but numbers from market watcher DisplaySearch show it's still a depressing businesses to be in.
Some 55.5m TVs shipped in Q2 2011, down - albeit by just a single percentage point - on Q2 2010's total.
Sales of all types of TV were down with one …

Philips

Ah well

we have no compulsive new technology at the moment. 3-DTV has not caught on, and most people either already have, don't really care or don't know about HD.

What we have here is a down-swing compared to a previous up-swing caused by LCD TVs. People could see that an LCD TV occupies less space for a larger screen, can be wall mounted, and uses less electricity than a CRT, but do many of them care that LED is better than CFL for the back-light? And the current ultra-slim tellies are not that much slimmer than the 2-3 inches of the last generation in the scale of a living room. People are realising that, as long as it works, their two year old telly is still adequate for watching Coronation Street, the Simpsons, or Mythbusters.

Are we, at last, seeing a return to a domestic consumer electronics market that is not dominated by hype and the need for the latest shiny things? I sincerely hope so.

3D is the killer..

If I was in the market for a TV I wouldn't want a 3D one at all. I would see it as paying a premium for a feature I do not want and would never use. Worse that that (for TV Manufactures) is that a lot of less technical people think that a 3D tv is just that.. it only does 3D. I'm certain my parents would think "We don't want a 3D picture, we just want a normal TV".

Manufactures need to drop 3D as a headline selling feature, include it in the sets if you must, but remove the 3D moniker in the name.